SI: The 2026 season begins with baseball being more popular than it has been in years

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Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge Are Spearheading a New Golden Era of Baseball

The 2026 season begins with baseball being more popular than it has been in years, largely thanks to Ohtani and Judge. The trick for MLB now is to keep the momentum going.

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Like Bird and Magic—one on the East Coast, one on the West, gobbling up MVPs, playing a sui generis style thanks to their size and strength—Judge and Ohtani are the standard bearers helping to carry their sport to heights not seen in a generation. Baseball attendance has increased three straight years for the first time since 2005–07. The World Series, in which Ohtani won his second straight championship since joining the Dodgers, averaged 34 million viewers in the United States, Canada and Japan, the biggest World Series audience since 1992. Game 7 attracted 51 million viewers in the U.S., Canada and Japan, the most watched game since Game 7 of the ’91 World Series. Thanks to the pitch clock, the average time of game has been no more than two hours, 40 minutes for three straight years for the first time since 1983–85.

The 2026 season rides the wings of this renaissance but under the threat of a gathering storm: a labor war. Owners are likely to impose a lockout of the players when the collective bargaining agreement expires Dec. 1, as happened in '21. That lockout ended after 99 days, just in time to preserve what is now a record 31-season streak without a game being lost to labor strife (since the MLBPA was officially recognized in 1966). An end to that streak would curb the game’s momentum, not to mention stealing from the primes of Judge, who turns 34 in April, and Ohtani, who turns 32 in July.

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